I mentioned last time that I had Emerald Fire up on pre-order. For those of you who have grabbed a copy of Ruby Heart, don’t miss out on the next book. If you like steampunk fantasy and cups of tea then this book is for you. Emerald Fire, a tad more manners, magic and mayhem!

I think Emerald Fire is better than Ruby Heart. I had so much fun with it. I’ve taken the characters and given them a big workout. I’m so excited to know what you think.

Frauke at Croco Designs did a great job on the cover as well. I am so pleased.

The series is Amazon only for the moment. I’ll let you know when it is with other retailers.

I was going to China for two weeks at the beginning of November and then to Perth for the last week of November but that’s changed. My son has to go to the USA so we cancelled my China trip. I’m kind of sad about that because I miss my son and it’s hard knowing that the rhythm of his life is so different to mine. However, I am extremely lucky my two daughters live close by and all my grandchildren have been living close too.

Now that I will be around for most of November, I can do NaNoWriMo! Happy dance.

I have finished editing up Ruby Heart, which I got back from my agent. It didn’t sell obviously. But after cutting out some superfluous sex and violence, I think the fault is mostly mine and maybe some of it is the industry. I know so much more about the market when I wrote it and when it got taken up by the agent. It was sort of YA and then leaped into adult and back to YA. After the slashing it is now YA/cosy level I think. There’s still a bit of action and violence but nothing like before. Ruby Heart is a steampunk/paranormal romance, with gothic horror and cosy mystery tropes. It features Jemima Hardcastle who is way too clever for her own good.

I commissioned covers for Ruby Heart and the sequel Emerald Fire. As Emerald Fire is only half written, so guess what my NaNoWriMo project is. I have to believe I can get this done around my other commitments. I’ve done my tax return and that usually frees up my mind. And I will certainly do a cover reveal when I get the covers.

I also commissioned new covers for the Silverlands series and we will see how that goes. I’m going to rework the blurbs for that series too.

Anyway, I must return to the grindstone. I’m meant to be focussing on uni and the PhD today.

I am a bit distracted. You might have noticed the pop up newsletter sign up form when you came here. Apologies if that is annoying. If you close it, the form won’t pop up ever again. You wouldn’t believe how much effort and annoyance went in to understanding Mailchimp and getting it to work. It was a great achievement for me to get the pop up form working. I was going to put a embedded sign up form in the sidebar but I couldn’t get it to work either.

Mailing lists are important for authors. Some say they don’t work. Some say they are essential. But I’m going with the essential school. You see there are websites where you can give away a book and a person signs up to your newsletter. Maybe they will just unsubscribe or maybe they will like the book and want to know how to get the rest. Yet it is a way to capture and keep your audience.

Now if you closed that pop up sign up form but now find yourself interested in signing up well there’s a Newsletter page on the top bar and that has a url link to a sign up page. The sign up process requires a confirmation sent to your email.

One of the issues with newletters is content. I have a lot going on this first half of the year and also mark downs etc. I was thinking that there would be four newsletters a year but maybe I need the flexibility to do more.

Feel free to use the contact form to tell me what you think or topics you want covered.

So why am I writing about distractions? Well I’m meant to be working the PhD and learning how to do this stuff is a massive time sink. Essential to learn, unless you are paying top dollars to someone to do it for you. Having a newsletter has always been the too hard basket for me. Too much effort! And basically you think your publishers are going to do their magic, but it doesn’t happen that way. If I’m taking this self-publishing gig seriously then I have to do it right and thorough.

I have to earn money to support my PhD studies. I could get a job part-time and I did consider it seriously. I even thought about editing, manuscript appraisals and similar things and I am open for that but not in a big way. My PhD and my writing come first. For the first part of the year I’m focussing on getting some books out and smart marketing. For the PhD I’m focussing on my creative side and the survey stuff.

Yesterday I received feedback on my draft research proposal. Think ‘back to the drawing board’. Yep, so next Monday I’m going to start again.

The issues I had were that I used someone else’s structure, which I was told to do. But it doesn’t really suit my project. Then I was advised that I had too much in there, like three Phd’s worth of stuff in my proposal. That is probably true. A classic new PhD student mistake. I am doing a creative work and a 30,000 exegesis so not a lot of room. It was a fruitful feedback session and I have a much better question and will basically use my surveys and interviews as the core of my exegesis.

In other news, I heard from the editor of Oathbound (Silverlands book 2) and the edits are due Friday. She’s done. Big job ahead. Once I get a handle on the edits and know when it will go to the proofreader I can put Oathbound up on pre-order. It’s taken ages.

Some of you may recall my first long form publication was Rayessa and the Space Pirates, which was picked up by Harlequin’s Escape Publishing (digital imprint) in 2013. Rayessa had been languishing my hard drive for a number of years. It started as a short story, maybe way far back as 2002. I was writing the story for Elsewhere. At the time the first 7,500 were the longest short I’d written and it still wasn’t done. When the space pirates turned up, well I knew it wasn’t going to be a short story anymore. It ended up as a novella, then a slightly longer novella. It took it out and revised it a couple of times. I gave it to a couple of people to read with some positive feedback. I submitted it a couple of places. Once it was forwarded to the children’s editor at HarperCollins Australia. It was rejected but the rejection was along the lines of we already have stories along these lines and sorry to take so long to get back to you. Then it sat in the hard drive a little longer. Then I went to my first RWA conference in the Gold Coast (2012) where Penguin launched their Destiny Imprint and Harlequin launched Escape. It was actually at the launch cocktail party of Destiny that I clued in that Rayessa was also a romance. Chinking champagne glasses with Nicole Murphy I said that I thought I had romance arc in some of my stories. She was like ‘Dah, why do you think I told you to come here?’ The clue people was the slideshow they had playing on the walls. Science fiction scenes at a romance conference.

So Rayessa was published. Then I wrote Rae and Essa’s Space Adventures, which should have been titled, Essa Takes on the Space Pirates or better still. Essa Rescues Mum from the Space Pirates etc. Now Escape decided they didn’t want any more spate pirate stories from me when they took Rae and Essa’s Space Adventures (and also revamped the Rayessa cover). Not with this family at least. So I changed the ending to Rae and Essa’s Space Adventures so there wasn’t too much hanging. But I always had in mind to write Opeia’s story. Opeia (Opi) is the mother of Rae and Essa, the head of AllEarth Corp.

Now pesky ideas will keep bothering you until your write them down. I thought I’d dealt with Opi by writing some notes about the story in my ‘Notebook of Really Cool Ideas’ that Gillian Polack gave me when I started the PhD. It is meant as a place to park ideas so I can come back to them when the Phd is done. Well obviously Opi had other ideas.

Opi meets NaNoWriMo and viola! she is out there on paper! I tried to be more emotionally contemplative in Opi Battles the Space Pirates. My wonderful beta reader (who is a fan of the first two books) gave me feedback. I had to rewrite the beginning and the ending after that. That plot twist that I had come up with but abandoned because I was trying to address my plot addiction by being a bit more touchy feely, well I had to put the plot bit in. It’s just that type of book.

It’s fluff, it’s funny (I think so) and it’s light and possibly uplifting. (Complete opposite to the Dragonwine series). Opi Battles the Space Pirates is also longer than the first two books, just under 60,000 words, it’s adult, but not sexy, more sweet in keeping with the other two books. It features an older protagonist (42) and a space battle goddamit!

Stay tuned. Cover art is in progress. Proofreading is in progress. I’m going to self-publish this one for fun.

Just to refresh your memory, here are the covers of the first two books, which I adore. Not sure the wonderful covers sell as many books as they should, but they are pretty and swish.

Link to the Escape website here. The books are at all major e-retailers. You can also buy these books in large print format/hardcover for libraries I think. I can’t afford to buy myself a hard back version. There are some copies in libraries in Australia and the USA. Here.

However, I plan to have a print version of Opi Battles the Space Pirates. Just for fun, for a laugh and maybe as giveaways. So watch out.

It’s summer here in good ol’ Australia. In Canberra, like elsewhere in the country it’s hot. It’s bloody hot. Canberra is usually dry so the heat can be bearable. However, when it gets humid it’s a right stinker. There are other places worse off so I won’t claim the most miserable place to be.

Yesterday I worked from home with the aircon on downstairs in my house. It was completely bearable. Every time I went upstairs it was like stepping into a furnace. My god it was hot up there.

Come bedtime I went up to the bedroom and turned on the aircon above the bed. The aircon above the bed was dead. I tried the fuse box, changing the batteries in the remote control, turning it off and on at the wall. It was dead. Matthew came home and he confirmed it was dead. We don’t use the aircon much, maybe once or twice a year. It worked last time I turned it on about a week or two ago.

Why I didn’t just go back down stairs I don’t know. I put our ceiling fan on but even on high, blowing a hurricane, it made no difference. I had ice water and naked skin. Still no joy there in the sleep stakes.

Today, I’m headachey and queasy and not too happy about it either. I came into campus as the study centre has excellent aircon, but I’m not feeling up to scratch at all. I’m not sure why I’m here. Can I actually read and process academic journal articles, read French philosophy? Just the thought makes me want to puke.

It’s not all doom and gloom. I did finish Opi Battles the Space Pirates last week and laid it out for proofreading. It’s a bit of fluff. It’s fun and I hope funny. The world needs some comic relief just now.

Also, the last call for romance writers boosted the responses somewhat. I’m still looking for respondents for both surveys.

I’m back into PhD mode, currently working on the all important research proposal for my confirmation seminar. These confirmation seminars happen about a year in to the degree study and one can present (in theory) an indepth research proposal and get approval to do the PhD proper. It’s weird because you know I’m doing the PhD now, and I’ll be doing it after confirmation. It’s a formal part of the process to ensure I have something worthwhile to research now I have had a year looking into the research material. I get assessed and I get a drilling on my presentation and the topic. All good.

I’m at present beavering away at writing up the proposal and pulling together my literature review. It’s not quite structured properly yet but I’m getting there. I have really enjoyed the research part of this degree. Romance fiction, feminism, incomprehensible French philosophers are all so enthralling. I haven’t really been able to pull myself away from it to work on the creative work. But after the confirmation seminar in March, I will.

Part of my research, a very important part of my unique contribution, is the two surveys I am conducting at the moment (and when I do them this year, the selected in-depth interviews). I am surveying writers of popular romance fiction and readers of popular romance fiction. When I was putting the proposal forward for clearance the biggest concern from the bureaucracy here was how was I going to reach readers of romance fiction. These days that is easier than people think. I’ve read articles where the researcher couldn’t get sufficient readers to participate in their research. This was years ago before the big websites dedicated to romance, social media and even here the Australian Romance Readers Association (ARRA). I’ve had a really good response thanks to all those means, Smart Bitches Trashy Books, Dear Author, Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and ARRA (who have been awesome!). Authors have also been spreading the word to their readers. The response is so good that we could go for statistically significant for reader response so yes I’m still looking for readers of romance fiction. Please spread the word. Do the survey if you are a reader of romance!

The irony is that I’m sadly lacking in romance fiction authors responding to the survey, particularly in comparison to the reader response. I know there are thousands of romance authors out there. I am having trouble reaching them. Romance Writers of Australia has nearly a 1000 members, Romance Writers of America has over 10,000 members. You think it would be easy. But it’s not. I’m not a member of the Romance Writers of America for example and it’s not easy for me to wave the flag and say lookie here.

Not easy to reach popular romance authors, not easy to convince them to complete me lovely survey. Come on darlings, look over here. Look at my nice survey!

I am currently undertaking a PhD through the University of Canberra in popular romance fiction and as part of that study I have two surveys going.

I’ve got a great response rate so far but I need more. Yes MORE!!!!

If you are a READER of popular ROMANCE fiction can you help me out? The more readers who respond, the more valid the findings will be.

If you are a popular ROMANCE fiction AUTHOR your response to the survey will really help me out!

In both cases I’m after honest views.

Romance writers can be romance readers but I have questions on their romance reading in the writer survey so you don’t need to do two surveys.

I think the survey can take up to 15-20 minutes to do.

It is mostly tick boxes but your free text comments are very valuable.

I am also going to select some people for a follow up interview only if the respondent is WILLING. There is space to indicate your willingness to be involved in this is the consent form. The consent form is the first part of the survey. I can only do follow up interviews a small number of people during 2017. NOTE; you can do your survey without leaving contact details if you wish. I won’t know who you are except for an IP address.

This survey is for my PhD, which is examining ROMANCE FICTION. Please help!